What is flourish?

Famous quotes containing the word flourish:

    A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.
    Harry S. Broudy (b. 1905)

    Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.
    William Blake (1757–1827)

    All the flowers of the spring
    Meet to perfume our burying;
    These have but their growing prime,
    And man does flourish but his time.
    Survey our progress from our birth—
    We are set, we grow, we turn to earth
    John Webster (c. 1580–1638)